Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020
In her youth,Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram,endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents),and spent years chasing after a dishevelled,homeless'artist'- all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things,mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night,and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.
This is a love story and a story about betrayal. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit,Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery cords of memory and myth that bind two women together,and hold them apart.
Publisher: Penguin Books LtdISBN: 9780241989142Number of pages: 240Weight: 170 gDimensions: 198 x 129 x 15 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'A masterclass. Crisp,engaging,perfectly tragic in the way that families often tend to be... Doshi writes sharply,in no-nonsense prose,not a single sentence in the book can be omitted... Avni Doshi is a force to watch out for in the literary world'- Scroll
'Avni Doshi quietly,cleanly,slices through the heart... Impeccably insightful,carved from love,rage,and grief,here all embellishment is discarded,all artifice shorn - motherhood,family,memory,language - to reveal something devastating about our relationships,with ourselves and with those closest to us'- Janice Pariat,author of The Nine-Chambered Heart
'Daring and deliciously dark,Burnt Sugar will keep you gripped until the very last sentence. A brilliant debut,about mothers and daughters,that manages be acerbic and brittle all at the same time. Raw,wise and cuttingly funny on love and cruelty,marriage and motherhood,art and illness,and one woman's fight for her sense of self. A courageous novel written in spare,gleaming sentences. It made me hold my breath and gather it up again'- Tishani Doshi,author of Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
'Beautifully grotesque,vivid,unexpected. Doshi knows her characters so intimately I felt I could reach out and touch the skin they're in'- Diksha Basu,author of The Windfall
'Acerbic,full of wit and cool intelligence - every sentence is a coiled spring and each psychological portrait burns itself into the mind. I couldn't put it down. Crystalline,surgical,compulsively readable. An examination of toxic relationships and the ties that bind us. A disturbing tale of memory and forgetfulness,questioning the relevance and the authenticity of both'- Indian Express
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